Phil Balagtas, Lead Interaction Designer, discusses what it's like working for GE during a press tour around GE's first innovation center April 24, 2014 at the GE Global Software Center in San Ramon, Calif.

David Gilmore, Senior UX Researcher, shows off the "holodeck" during a press tour around GE's first innovation center April 24, 2014 at the GE Global Software Center in San Ramon, Calif. The 25 foot room isn't exactly 360 degrees, but it offers a nearly 360 degree view of moving images and still images along with audio recorded with a 360 GoPro rig to provide GE employees with an immersive experience. The hope is that in immersing designers in the experience of the people using GE technology and equipment, it will create empathy and thus foster better problem-solving.

Raju Venkataramana, Senior Scientist for collaboration and mobile solutions lab, demonstrates an app called My World during a press tour around GE's first innovation center April 24, 2014 at the GE Global Software Center in San Ramon, Calif.

With a newly expanded innovation center in San Ramon, General Electric is trying to prove that even a 136-year-old company with more than 300,000 employees can act like a Silicon Valley startup.

The industrial conglomerate founded by Thomas Edison envisions the Design and Experience Center, which debuted in February, as an incubator of innovation for employees who design everything from aircraft engines to sales presentations.

GE has invested heavily to outfit the state-of-the-art meeting rooms, including a circular 25-foot-diameter holographic-style room that gives engineering teams a better feel for the projects they're designing.

Growing fast

The design center is part of GE's Global Software Center, which opened in 2012. The building is home to 900 employees, more than double last year's number, and that should grow to 1,200 by the end of this year. That includes a 60-member software design team that didn't exist two years ago, said Greg Petroff, the center's chief experience officer.

"We are a startup within GE that has grown very, very quickly," he said.

That's why the location is so important. The center has recruited software designers from big companies like Oracle and SAP, along with designers from smaller Silicon Valley startups.

"The reason why we're here in the Bay Area is because the center of gravity for that kind of knowledge is here, not only in design but in data science and cloud computing," Petroff said.

But the Fairfield, Conn., company also sees the center as way to convince its own skeptical workers that it's time to "challenge some of our own orthodoxies," Petroff said.

That kind of swift cultural change does cause friction, even at a company founded on one of the biggest inventions in human history, the incandescent light bulb.

"There's plenty of people in the company who are looking at us and trying to understand how they fit in," Petroff said. "The platform we're building is highly disruptive, and could disrupt whole software development teams in other parts of the company."

During a tour this week, designers showed projects such as giant touch-screen monitors that will give power-industry workers fingertip access to historical data about when, where and how electrical outages have occurred and how to prevent them before they happen.

Melody Ivory, a user experience scientist, said one project to reimagine a ship's control panel paid off quickly.

"We were able to redesign this 40-year-old system within six months, which is a tremendous undertaking," she said.

Petroff demonstrated software for a new tablet information system designed for field engineers.

Create faster

"Create better software faster," he said. "That was the kind of concept behind what we're trying to accomplish."

During the last quarter, GE earned $3 billion in net income on revenue of $34.18 billion. While consumers may know GE most for light bulbs and refrigerators, GE also makes medical imaging machines and is now focused on industrial equipment like aircraft engines, power plant turbines and drilling equipment for the oil and gas industry.

The design center touches on all of those businesses.

Visual designer Leo Schneider said even the most skeptical employees seem impressed once they visit and interact with the center's design teams.

"They feel like, wow, you guys really bring a lot to the table," Schneider said. "So it's a constant change of mind-set. The skepticism little by little is going away, and the entire culture is being unified around design."

"He is instructing senior management at the company that they have to get on this," Petroff said. "This is a major change initiative for the company, from a culture standpoint, from a business standpoint, from an execution standpoint and from a growth standpoint."

Those innovations are "not only making our services better, he believes there's net revenue we're going to generate that's all new," he said.